November 18, 2008

SocialToo Launches SocialSurveys for Polling Via Twitter

For the last few months, I've been using a service called SocialToo to transparently and automatically follow those people who choose to follow my accounts on Twitter and Identica. Rather than resort to manually deciding who to add to my list, or going to other services, such as Twitter Karma, SocialToo has been automatically synchronizing my lists. Today, the author, Jesse Stay, also a frequent contributor to this site, has rolled out a new feature aimed at making the service much more interactive and differentiated, with the launch of SocialSurveys, a viral way to quickly poll your followers on Twitter.

As with other online polling engines, creation of the survey consists of posting a question and listing potential answers. You have to list at least two choices, of course, but you can theoretically post as many options as you wish.

When the survey is completed, you can then check the box that sends the URL for the survey via Twitter, and hit submit. This sends the survey to Twitter, and automatically reduces the URL using the is.gd engine, to fit in Twitter's strict 140 character limit.

Given that SocialToo is "social" by nature, you can even sign up to follow surveys your friends have created, using RSS.

The addition of SocialSurveys is an interesting wrinkle atop what is already a fairly strong feature set for SocialToo, despite its spartan interface. You can not only autofollow the Twitter and Identica registrants, as I mentioned, but you can blacklist people from ever following you, or even automatically unfollow those who stop following you, essentially acting as your own personal Qwitter in the background. And if you want, you can even route your personal socialtoo.com domain to your Facebook profile.

How SocialSurveys Appear to Visitors

The Results of the SocialSurvey, In Bar Chart Form

SocialToo, authored by Jesse, is partly owned by Guy Kawasaki. Kawasaki, upon the launch of SocialSurveys, is sponsoring the site with Alltop ads for the first few weeks.